An attorney working on an Oregon county’s climate lawsuit against the oil and gas industry will appear in July before House Republicans looking into alleged efforts to influence judges.
Roger Worthington, who represents the Oregon county and was one of two attorneys to receive a letter in January asking about his interactions with a judicial education group, has agreed to sit for a deposition, following a subpoena in May.
Worthington said the lawmakers’ request appears motivated at placating the industry. It comes as the Trump administration and Republican legislators have ramped up efforts to quash nearly two dozen lawsuits filed by local and state governments seeking compensation for the costs of climate change. The cases — if successful — could cost the oil industry billions of dollars.
“The committee is throwing Big Oil a bone they can chew on to advance their false narrative that climate accountability lawsuits are illegal, anti-American and driven by tort lawyer avarice,” Worthington told POLITICO’s E&E News.
The deposition comes after months of correspondence between Worthington and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio and House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts Chair Darrell Issa of California. The lawmakers said in the subpoena they are investigating whether there was coordination between the Washington-based Environmental Law Institute and Worthington’s law firm “to secure favorable judgments in climate-related cases.”
Committee Republicans did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Republicans have been targeting the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute and its Climate Judiciary Project since 2023 after industry and conservative groups raised questions about the organization and the objectivity of judges handling climate lawsuits, following a handful of losses at the Supreme Court.
ELI has said its program provides judges, “who are often generalists, with the context they need to effectively manage the evidence that will be presented by the parties in cases that come before them.”
The institute has said its Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case.”
At least one Democrat has accused the fossil fuel industry and its allies of looking to influence judges. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, last week asked the policymaking body of the federal courts to tighten rules for judges, citing a recent judicial seminar run by George Mason George Mason University’s Law and Economics Center.
Whitehouse accused the fossil fuel industry of wanting judges to “rely on industry-funded front groups to learn its version of climate ‘science.’”
Worthington noted Chevron, which is named in the Oregon lawsuit, already tried to raise ELI as a factor in a motion accusing him of “perpetrating a fraud on the court,” but that the court denied the company’s request to depose him.
The oil company in a motion last September noted Worthington had featured on his website a prepublication version of a judicial climate education “module” used by ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project.
Chevron claimed the appearance “raises significant questions as to whether the law firm is engaged in an effort to prejudice the courts more broadly in its client’s and litigation allies’ favor.”
But the company did not raise the allegation during a hearing last October in the climate case from Multnomah County, Oregon. The judge rejected Chevron’s efforts to remove two scientific studies — which were unrelated to ELI — from the lawsuit. He did chastise Worthington for failing to tell the court about his involvement with two papers from the scientific journal Nature.
Worthington has said he was unaware ELI existed until he was researching attribution science while working on the Oregon lawsuit. He said he spoke with a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who was working on a primer about attribution science, which involves studying potential links between global warming and individual weather events.
Worthington said “because it was educational,” he posted the document, “Drawing the Causal Chain: The Detection and Attribution of Climate Change,” on his website in April 2023. It sat there, publicly available, until Chevron — and then Republican lawmakers — flagged it.
“Jordan and Issa are giving Big Oil the prize the Oregon County Court would not — a chance to conduct an inquisition, delve into confidential trial strategy, besmirch my character, and cast doubt on the motives and merits of Multnomah County’s civil case,” Worthington said.
Worthington’s attorney, Andrew Herman, told the committee in a letter last week that attorney-client privilege protects Worthington’s communications with clients concerning litigation strategy, case theory and use of third-party resources.
Herman noted the First Amendment limits Congress’s authority to compel disclosure of Worthington’s associations with organizations engaged in litigation and advocacy.
“Mr. Worthington will assert these protections at the deposition as appropriate, along with all rights relating to questions that lack a sufficient nexus to a legitimate legislative purpose or implicate pertinency issues,” he wrote.
When it defended Worthington in court last fall, Multnomah County included a sworn declaration from Worthington, who said he had nothing to do with ELI. He said he was not a member, had never been a speaker at its programs, never attended or been invited to attend any ELI meetings and had no role preparing any documents prepared by or for the institute.
The county also noted in its brief to the court that a number of law firms involved in defending the fossil fuel companies have raised money for ELI.
Among the law firms that sponsored a 2025 ELI dinner were Perkins Coie, which signed Chevron’s motion against Worthington, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, counsel for ConocoPhillips.
